One thing that we bet you didn’t have on your 2024 bingo card is not one but two classical musicians releasing new music almost 200 years after their deaths. If you did, BINGO, because previously unknown works from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Frédéric Francois Chopin have been uncovered this year. That’s right, the long-dead composers have given us new music before Rihanna and Frank Ocean. (For the uninitiated, both RiRi and Frank last gave us albums in 2016, the last great year in music.)

In September this year, it was revealed that a new Mozart piece, titled ‘Serenade in C,’ had been discovered at the Leipzig Municipal Libraries, in Germany, during the process of updating the Köchel Catalogue, which is a chronological list of Mozart’s compositions that organises Mozart’s vast body of work. 

The catalogue is updated every few decades to include new works, revisions, and other changes that Mozart scholars have discovered over the years. The piece, dating back to the mid-to-late 1760s when Mozart would have been a teenager, is a short but captivating 12-minute work of seven tiny, lively movements designed for a string trio. In classical music speak, “movements” refer to separate sections within a larger composition, each with distinct musical ideas, tempo, and mood. The ‘Serenade in C’, also known as Ganz kleine Nachtmusik, made its debut at the launch of the updated Köchel Catalogue in Salzburg on September 19, 2024, with a public performance on the steps of the Leipzig Opera shortly after.

As if that wasn’t enough, across the pond in New York, USA, a previously unheard Chopin waltz was recently discovered at the Morgan Library and Museum. Curator Robinson McClellan found the work as he was sorting through ‘cultural memorabilia’, which included postcards signed by famous painter Pablo Picasso, a vintage photograph of a French actress and letters from Brahms and Tchaikovsky. The piece was determined to be authentic after extensive research, which included handwriting experts and leading Chopin scholars. The work is believed to be from 1830 – 1835 when the composer was in his 20s. Experts believe that Chopin, born in Poland and died in 1849, wrote as many as 28 waltzes but only lived to see eight published. Nine were published posthumously, and the rest were lost or destroyed. But now, almost 200 hundred years later, we’re being treated to new music from the beloved composer. 

Renowned pianist Lang Lang, who played the waltz for The New York Times, described it as “dramatic darkness turning into a positive thing”. And having heard it, we agree. Who knows, maybe 200 years from now, our great-great-great-great grandkids will be the ones to finally get new music from Rihanna and Frank Ocean.

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